Putting Philanthropy in Right Relation with Organizing

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

 

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mock. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to make.

Before we get started, I wanna thank Helen and Albany for becoming a subscriber at the Movement Builder Level. Convergence Magazine is an independent publication that relies on the generosity of readers and listeners, just like Helen, to create the rigorous, thoughtful takes that you’ve come to expect from us week in and week out.

You can join [email protected] slash donate. Any amount helps. Either is a one-time donation or a recurring monthly or annual subscription. This week on the show, I’m joined by the president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Carmen Rojas. As part of our ongoing conversation about what the role of philanthropic foundations and donors can or should be in efforts to bolster movement organizing.

We recorded this interview earlier this week and had a great discussion about how Marguerite Casey is working to be in a right relationship with people’s movements under our current political conditions. But first, these headlines. First of all, a very personal fuck you to Gavin Newsom, who’s been diving headfirst into the same waters.

Federal Democrats have already been swimming in telling Charlie Kirk, of all people that he’s quote, done with trans people in sports, there’s so many things wrong with this from the venue to the content, and a lot more I could say, but I’m not gonna waste my breath. If you’re al, if you aren’t already following the $300 million lawsuit that de the energy transfer, the oil company that brought you the Dakota Access Pipeline has brought against Greenpeace Hearing started this week in North Dakota.

This is a blatantly a SLAP suit, which stands for strategic litigation against public participation, and could totally bankrupt the organization. It’s a suit that’s filed simply to scare organizations into submission, and this particular suit is a bit of a test case to see what corporations like energy transfer can get away with.

There are a lot of issues with this lawsuit, like the fact that the environmental giant didn’t actually quote, orchestrate the protests at Standing Rock, indigenous people organized them, but it’s not a coincidence that North Dakota is going after the Greenpeace In particular, there are huge organization and one of the most recognized names when it comes to environmental and climate direct action.

They’re being targeted because they represent something in the public imagination. It’s also worth noting that while criminal RICO charges are still pending for the Atlanta 61, as we discussed on this show last month, North Dakota Civil Rico charges brought by energy transfer against Greenpeace have already been tossed out.

This is part of a broader effort by corporations and the state to weaponize the legal system to crush dissent. These cases are related and this is all of our business. Earlier this week, the Washington Post also published this really interesting investigation into the Trump White House’s media and communication strategy.

I’d encourage you to check the full story out if this is something you’re interested in. Let me summarize and save you some psychic damage if you’re not feeling quite up to it. It’s chock-full of people from the administration saying the quiet part out loud about the purposeful cruelty of their comm strategy.

There are plenty of quotes acknowledging the intentionality of its design as an accelerant for the out current outrage fueled media system. They reaffirm the Steve Bannon’s strategy of flooding the zone with shit that we often reference. Shotgun people with so many offensive memes, they’re paralyzed into non-action.

They also talk about the intentionality of converting White House comms efforts from its historical role as a defensive reactive PR crisis control type operation to an offensive assault on all of their enemies. Most notably, this article exposes why so many extremely offensive and objectively cruel posts are coming from government social media accounts to your social media timeline.

For example, the deportation A SMR video that went out on the official White House Twitter account that you may have unfortunately seen, or the generative AI video that went out on Donald Trump’s Instagram account. Envisioning Gaza as a tacky golden Trump resort. Kalen Dore, a 3-year-old veteran of right-wing social media projects, and the head of Trump’s digital team has said, quote, even the tagline we’ve been using America is Back, is very much saying, we’re here, we’re in your face.

It’s irreverent, it’s unapologetic. The sooner we accept the fact that the keys to White House communications have been handed over to Griper Incel who grew up melting their brains on four chan in their mom’s basement, the better. The goal of this is to instigate you into a pathetic response to their middle school level bullying.

Take it from someone who grew up in the same online bog swamp as these trolls do not give them the satisfaction. Next time you feel compelled to comment. Remember, attention is a troll’s entire diet. Walk away. Eventually you could turn back and watch them starve to death. On that note, we’ve gotta talk about Trump’s joint address to Congress.

Last Tuesday, the majority of the Democratic Party was out here with cute little symbolic actions like its business as usual, wearing pink. Those cute little hand paddles, gimme a break. Let’s give some appreciation instead to Representative Al Green of Texas who is ejected from the chamber after shouting down Trump over the proposed destruction of Medicaid.

The destruction of Medicaid is a genocidal policy proposal, and green is taking that seriously as such, and honestly, this was a huge Mr opportunity for more Democrats to follow his lead and really disrupt Trump’s opportunity to have a pomp and circumstance moment. 20 or 30 Democrats had the wherewithal to stand up to Trump to his face like Mr.

Green on a live telecast, one after the other. There’s a good chance that man would’ve had a toddler esque meltdown derailing the whole evening. Instead, green was escorted out of the chamber and that was that. Also, we’re gonna point your attention to representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She posted this nearly hour long response to Trump’s speech on YouTube, and if you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, you’ll probably find yourself nodding along to a lot of what she says throughout her call.

For more people of conscience to really step up and throw down as right on time, we’ll link to the full response in the show notes.

Earlier this week I spoke with the president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Carmen Rojas, the foundation, manages an endowment of around a billion dollars. If that sounds like a lot of money, sure it is. They use these funds to give community organizations some of the latitude that they need to do the work, to build a base and ideally operate with greater amount of autonomy.

It’s a model of philanthropic giving that’s trying to grapple with the fact that organizations need resources, but often those resources can come with some very sticky strings attached. Clearly the question of money in politics and political organizing is a messy one, especially on the left, but the reality is that our opponents are currently consolidating and wielding power at breakneck speed.

They got theirs through massive financial investments into political power building, ideological development, and the educational and communications projects that we are grappling with today over the arc of decades. While we do have raw numbers of people who largely agree with us and good ideas on our side, the work of organizing them towards wielding political power takes the sustained investment of labor, technology and other resources that unfortunately do cost money.

In a political ecosystem where one man can buy a seat of massive power in the White House for, about $270 million without batting an eye, we can’t expect to compete with the assumption that already exhausted working. People can just endlessly volunteer their dwindling free time to build the power and resources that we need to win.

We can’t replicate their systems because their systems are built with their values and we don’t have time to waste. I really enjoyed talking with Dr. Rojas about these pressing questions. Here’s our interview from earlier this week, Dr. Carmen Rojas. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:08:30] Carmen Rojas: Thank you so much for having me, Caden.

[00:08:32] Cayden Mak: Definitely. To get us started, could you give us a little quick intro to your work at Marguerite Casey? Tell us a bit about how you all are investing in power building and how that works for you all. 

[00:08:43] Carmen Rojas: Sure. First, thanks so again for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Marguerite Casey Foundation, we are really focused on building a country where our government prioritizes the needs of.

Included and underrepresented people. And I feel like that is sets us apart from folks in that we believe that the state and the government owes the people should be representative of the dreams and aspirations of people and wanna support the kind of organizing that can hold, go government accountable when it’s not doing that.

And can. Sort of plant seeds of what a possible state that is actually representative and responsive to people’s needs. Looks like we support everything from grassroots tenants unions in Canne, Kansas City to participatory budgeting projects in Birmingham, Alabama. We really see organizing as the key vehicle.

Through which people can democratically make decisions in organizations, in groups to set agendas and actually fight against and fight for the world that we want. 

[00:09:52] Cayden Mak: I think it’s a really critical vision that like makes sure that these organizations have the resources that they need to operate and serve their communities and represent their communities.

I’m curious how you think about operating as a grant maker in right relationship with these movement organizations. What’s the nature of the relationship that you build with your grantees? 

[00:10:10] Carmen Rojas: Gosh, it’s, I feel like I’m also a bit of an outlier in this. Like I am, I think a number of people in philanthropy can hyper romanticize a relationship with grant recipients.

[00:10:22] Cayden Mak: Sure. And it. 

[00:10:24] Carmen Rojas: Inauthentically, intimate or relational, overly relational. And I see our job as a movement bank, like I want us to move the most money possible to the leaders and organizations, to the scholars and initiatives that are actually transforming communities and building power nationwide.

And so functionally, what that means is that. We fund our community grant recipients at 25% of their budget for five years. We front load that funding and it’s pretty much we identify you through a process and you get money. And our job is to, and our job, frankly, like from a staffing perspective, and I credit Zeba Cali so much for this on our team, is to raise money for you.

So over the course of our engagement, it’s like we give you money and we raise money for you because we believe that. What you’re doing is transformative and in line with our mission. I also think, really moving from a place of curiosity and care. The weird thing about running a foundation is that I’m sure you’ve heard this from other people, like you work at a foundation, all of a sudden you become like the funniest, smartest person in every room you enter.

And we just don’t have that edge, like we are. Learners as an organization. There’s a whole bunch that we don’t know. We don’t know. What it takes to bring tenants together in Kansas City. We don’t know what it means to be in Alabama or Nashville and, work with elected officials to make public.

Long privatized goods. And so we wanna learn as an institution mostly so that we can share with our peers, but also so that, as we are out in the world and somebody else is doing a public budgeting project or somebody else is doing a tenant unions campaign, we can easily tether people together in a meaningful way.

[00:12:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that, one of the things that I was interested in talking to you about too is this, the role of educational programming. That it’s like you all do a lot of public facing education about what you’re learning as a foundation with practitioners, with scholars.

Really grappling with big questions. And I think that there’s something really, yeah, there there’s something very different about that, that I feel like often you see foundations who are maybe creating some programming, but it’s more oriented towards their existing community, whereas Yas is very front facing, like it is movement facing.

Could you talk a little bit about how you share some of the things that you’re learning? Yeah. And why that’s important to you? 

[00:12:57] Carmen Rojas: I feel like the art of political education has been lost. I could think a fissure in my heart that we talk a lot about movement, we talk a lot about organizing, but there’s no ideological set of commitments that people have come to either through learning or personal experience or both of those things, or right relationship that allows us to understand that we are actually all moving in the same direction.

And I think that. We over index on representational politics. As a way to signal that we are aligned. So I’m with a bunch of Latinas, so we are all aligned. I’m with a bunch of women of color, so we are all aligned. I’m with a bunch of women, so we are all aligned. And what nobody ever asks somebody like me is, I run a almost billion dollar institution.

Who am I aligned with? Yeah. Nobody ever asks that question. I think it’s a. Fundamental question that I have to always be asking myself. And that we need to start to create a context for so that we understand who we are in relationship with, what the world that we want looks like, how we get to that world what it means to be in principle disagreement with people that you want to get to.

And so we do things like. We do our book club, which is my most favorite thing, where we bring people from scholars to more popular authors, to be in conversation about the moment that we’re in through text. And then we give out books written by authors. We host a program called Summer School.

[00:14:37] Cayden Mak: Which 

[00:14:37] Carmen Rojas: essentially is, in the most joyful way, a dating program for academics and organizers to really grapple with sort of fundamental questions of our time. So like what? How do you disclose and divest? Why is that the call? And to hear from an investor, to hear from an organizer, to hear from a scholar on dispose and divest and why it’s important and how it’s possible for me helps.

Create situational awareness for my feet, my peers in the field and also ensures that we’re talking about the same thing, right? I don’t know what I like racial justice is one of those things where people say quite a bit, or organizing, frankly, is one of them. Yeah. 

[00:15:22] Cayden Mak: Organizing. Totally. 

[00:15:25] Carmen Rojas: And then you’re like, okay, but tell me what that looks like for you.

Is it only nonprofit organization with nonprofit staff doing like inward work to advance the nonprofits organization, the organizational mission, which is fine. Or is it people who are most impacted by the work of the nonprofit Democratically setting the agenda for the work of that institution in service of something bigger.

And I think sometimes we. In not pushing on those questions and asking for nuance. We make assumptions about the world that we want, right? Sure. Like I want a world with 90% public goods. That is the world that I want. I want a world without billionaires. I want a world without philanthropy.

I want a world where I, I can go to sleep at night and not be nervous at, in my state, North Carolina, trying to pass bills so that, 17 year olds can have guns without any training, without any dis it’s, I wanna live in that world. And that means that we have to be clear about the trade-offs between this world and that world.

And our public programming creates sort of a context for us to unearth. That, those trade offs. 

[00:16:37] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And that’s really it’s really interesting. I feel like you so rarely get people who are working in philanthropy and donor organizing really talking about this question that we all use words, but words are slippery.

Yeah. And it’s much harder to build alignment than I think, often we like to acknowledge in, in a lot of movement spaces. 

[00:16:59] Carmen Rojas: Totally. I also think that we don’t know how to be in yeah. This idea of principled disagreement, really. Sticks with me, especially in this political context, like where it’s easy to point on how sort of conservative forces have been able to weaponize our language and to, to do a whole bunch of things.

But we also have to name that we have exiled so many of our own, right? Like we have disparage so many of our own and we’ve done so in ways that feel antithetical to the loving, interdependent courageous. Just world that we want. So we’ll talk shit behind people’s. I don’t know if I could say that, right?

[00:17:42] Cayden Mak: Oh, you can swear on this show. It’s fine. 

[00:17:44] Carmen Rojas: Thanks. I was like I feel, yeah. This is what’s gonna happen. You talk shit behind people’s back and you don’t ever tell ’em. You go on social media and you tear them down we did that too. And I think we are at a moment in which. We frankly have an invitation to practice something different.

[00:18:03] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. No I was actually just at a book talk last night where one of the things that one of the speakers brought up was the fact that like after the 2017 Women’s March, that there was this moment where especially the three women of color who. Led the women’s march came under heavy attack on social media, and then it was like some years later that the New York Times revealed that a lot of that was a coordinated, like Russian bot attacks specifically to disorganized.

But we were so in such a brittle place that people were happy to, if not. Even in like without bandwagoning on it, stepping away from them and leaving them isolated. And I feel like that, that even the corrosive effects of that kind of thing where if we are so brittle as a movement that like people can spin up a couple bots on the internet and like spam.

A message and then we’re susceptible to that. That’s a big, it’s a big it’s a security problem. It’s also a strategy problem. 

[00:19:05] Carmen Rojas: Totally. It’s also call somebody, right? We talk a lot about organizing, but people just don’t call each other. And, don’t, I think that you, I think that’s, I love this description of brittle because I think we are still in that brittle place.

[00:19:22] Cayden Mak: We are. Yeah. 

[00:19:23] Carmen Rojas: And one of the things that I’m thinking. Quite a bit about is, what, where is the tub of Neosporin? What do we need to do to to soothe, to heal, to repair? And to fight because we have to do all of those things at the same time. And, I think a lot. I, I love like block and build just generally as a framing.

And we need to practice that with each other more than anywhere else, right? Yeah. Phone calling people saying, I heard this thing I wanna talk to you about it. I didn’t like it. It made me feel, it’s totally yeah. I think about, yeah, I’m in a, I’m in a long-term relationship and we spend a lot of time talking about turning in like when you’re in a relationship with anybody, it takes work.

Yeah. And we take our, the challenges with running a foundation in the nonprofit sector is that we take for granted the labor relationship in the institution of the nonprofit or the philanthropic institution. Which is one thing we think that because you work someplace, you’re the member of that organization as opposed to you are a worker for the people who are the members of that organization. That is a tough thing to come to grips with. And because there is a labor relationship, it’s hard. We don’t have good practice in building sort of the muscle of. Being in direct conversation with our peer, with our partners.

With grappling with each other, and then frankly, like very little public incentive to do that, to be clumsy. There is, 

[00:21:03] Cayden Mak: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I find myself struggling with it too is like somebody who leads an organization and who is in like a lot of coalition spaces like f. I’m a ruminator, like to think about every little thing and just being like, yeah, I should actually just send that person an email.

Like I should just be like, Hey, can we like get on the phone and talk about this thing? Or I think this is off. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to do. Even as somebody who’s I’m committed to being in relationship with. Other leaders of movement publications with other leaders of movement organizations that are not, media organizations.

It’s not easy. And I think also too going back to this conversation about how to be in right relationship with your grantees, there’s also like a way that I hear you talking a little like implicitly about positional power and like negotiating that relationship that it’s like.

We are not all peers. And that it’s like me and my staff, we are not peers in the sense that like I’m technically their boss. My board is not my peers. Yeah. ’cause technically they’re my boss. There’s all these sort of like implicit power relations that I think when they go unacknowledged, like this can turn, can also turn very toxic.

Agreed. 

[00:22:19] Carmen Rojas: Yeah, I’m not agree more. Like I just and I think we romanticize it, like I think about when I first got this job I am a person of the left, right? Like I, I studied in the left, like I am a product of. Both amazing left scholars and amazing left movement, global left movements, and I think people imagined that because I took this job and ran an organization that somehow we were gonna be a flat organization and there was not gonna be anybody.

Nobody was gonna make a decision without everybody knowing what the information. Not right. For some organizations it’s not right for this organization. 

[00:23:02] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:23:02] Carmen Rojas: And I think that there is a. Flippage that happens again, to come full circle when we don’t have clarity and don’t actually make explicit the implicit power relationships that we have with each other when we don’t make explicit something that I’m always trying to make explicit for myself, for our staff, for our grant recipients is that where life is precious, all life is precious. And so that means that even if I get a yuck in my stomach you deserve kindness. Like I’m going to practice being kind to you and, I’m going to work to organize you to actually be on our side.

I’m going, it’s just the privilege of this job and that’s not everybody else’s job. It is my job. 

[00:23:50] Cayden Mak: True. 

[00:23:51] Carmen Rojas: Yeah. It’s some people’s job to, to do, to take direct action against those people. It is some people’s job to do that. And I think one of the challenges in this moment of our sector, one of the things that make us brittle is that we think that there’s only one way to win.

[00:24:08] Cayden Mak: It 

[00:24:08] Carmen Rojas: tends to be like our own way. It’s like organizing these people in this way around this issue, then it would’ve been great. And it’s just not true. It’s not true. 

[00:24:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And also if we knew the one way we would already be doing it and we’d already one. And clearly that’s not the situation in which we find ourselves.

[00:24:24] Carmen Rojas: Totally. Totally. And that we need we need to actually do. The self-examination work and the recruitment work, right? 

[00:24:35] Cayden Mak: That’s right. What did I 

[00:24:36] Carmen Rojas: do? Like I think about myself in 2020. It’s so funny that you talk about the Women’s March and I was a bit of an asshole. Like I was just I thought I knew.

I had a level of certainty, an edge of certainty that comes from, being an academic that comes from being the only one that comes from being afraid. That comes from anxiety and nervousness. And the moment I was able to release that cadence, it was just like the world was my universe. And I was like I actually really don’t know.

I’m like, I’m gonna try something. Let’s see what happens. Like it, it created a bubble of oxygen for myself. And I don’t think many people are, we’re not giving ourselves that right now, and we need it the most. 

[00:25:21] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. Because giving yourself that space to, to not be it’s not like non-judgment, but it’s like holding some space for grace.

And understanding that like we’re, we are all trying a lot of this stuff for the first time because the material conditions are constantly changing. Even if it worked before, it might not work again. Yeah, that, that’s actually a huge gift we can give ourselves as movement people that like Yeah, 

[00:25:47] Carmen Rojas: absolutely.

[00:25:47] Cayden Mak: Nobody is standing between you and that gift. 

[00:25:50] Carmen Rojas: Totally. 

[00:25:51] Cayden Mak: You are. I think 

[00:25:53] Carmen Rojas: one of the things that I think is so fascinating about this, like one, the notion that everybody deserves kindness. Two, like to be clumsy and curious is. Creates so much more space than to be certain is that those are just choices that you just make.

And you have to make that choice. And it means that you put your ego on the side. It means that you’re like, Hey, baby Carmen, Hey girl, I know what you’re trying to do. Girl, check yourself. And remember like tie into the person that you are today. The world that we want into the future, right?

If I want an interdependent world. Where we can trust each other and we can protect each other, where we keep us safe, where we all have what we need to live dignified lives. But like the practice isn’t me today. 

And I think that is the thing about our grant recipients that I just love so much is like the gift to watch people and to be able to do our very small part to financially support them, to create more and more models of what that looks like out in the world.

[00:27:01] Cayden Mak: Nice on this where life is precious. Life is precious. Point, I know that one of the things that you all have been thinking about is also you have an endowment. And that’s huge. But like how you manage that endowment. And I think that this is the perpetual anti-capitalist critique of foundations is that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Could you talk a little bit about how your overall strategy as a foundation, knowing, the complexity of that, how that reflects your commitment? To the way that life is precious. 

[00:27:34] Carmen Rojas: Yeah, totally. So when I started it was like less than 10% of our align of our endowment was even like had screens, right?

So like screens against tobacco, alcohol, firearms. Screens against prisons. Like we just was not our orientation. I think like many philanthropic institutions we have, we had a conflicting commitment. 

[00:27:59] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Where on 

[00:27:59] Carmen Rojas: the one side we were like, oh, if we just keep on having more money in our endowment, then we can give out more money over here.

But nobody ever takes into account like the disproportionate size. So like 95%, let’s say an example is 95% of an institution’s resources are invested in fossil fuels, and then they give 5% of their endowment to support environmental justice that the math 

[00:28:22] Cayden Mak: ain’t math in Yeah. 

[00:28:24] Carmen Rojas: Jinx. Yeah. Like it just doesn’t make sense to me.

And I feel like I’ve worked for so many institutions that are. Bending over backwards to try to justify that as opposed to saying we have a values, we have a set of values. 

And our values are like, we believe that we should just be making infinite more money. And that infinite more money will allow us to give out some money on the grant making side.

It’s not as much, it’s not equal, but it allows us to do something. We at Margaret Casey, I think have a very different commitment, which is we want a hundred percent alignment. Like we don’t wanna look at anything in our endowment and say. Oh. We’re helping a billionaire get rich and take over our government.

No, we don’t want that. So we’re going to divest from the companies tied to said number of billionaires. Who have corporately captured our government in this moment. Every foundation, everybody could do that. Every person who has a retirement account can do it. We are not alone. Pension funds not magic.

It’s not a, it’s not a, yeah, it’s it’s a choice that you make about the values that we have, and we’re really lucky. Dan Gould, who leads our investments, spent the last three years taking us from 12%, just screened to a hundred percent alignment. So there’s nothing in our portfolio that I have to feel embarrassed or ashamed about.

There’s nothing in our portfolio that I feel that works at cross or counter purposes to our grant making. 

And more importantly it performs, right? Like we are actually, it’s not like we’re losing money. It’s not like we’re doing a charity with our endowment. We perform. Better than our peers do, who are in this conflicting commitment.

So it’s a kind of an invitation to, to say we could all be doing this. We can all choose where our money goes as individual consumers or as investors and in like in at institutions like ours at Mar Casey. It is totally possible. And we did it, in two and a half years. 

[00:30:28] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it’s fascinating because it’s such a study in frankly, political will. That, like the thing that’s missing in a lot of situations and that it does seem I was reading an article about Randy Weingart and the president of the American Federation of Teachers calling on pension funds to ditch certain things that are not in alignment with a vibrant, multiracial democracy, let’s say.

And that this is a conversation that needs to be happening at multiple different levels and there’s roles for lots of different organizations to play. It’s not just foundations with gigantic endowments. Totally. Like the fact that the president of a major union is calling for pension funds to divest is like really highlighting how.

We are all a lot of people are implicated even without knowing it. And that there’s no ethical consumptions or capitalism, but geez, do we have to be lining these people’s pockets? 

[00:31:13] Carmen Rojas: Totally. It’s also there is no ethical consumption, but there’s a lot better than what we’re doing now.

Like the thought that I’m like, oh, my stomach hurts. I need a Pepto Bismol. I want it at my door by somebody who gets paid sub minimum wage with no insurance. I. To go to the store to buy it, for me to bring it to my door immediately. And let’s imagine that the stomach ache was like what people were trying to solve for.

Oftentimes it’s a thing that you could buy in your neighborhood. And we have normalize this immediate, it’s like a dopamine response to I want this thing, I get this thing now. And the cost of that. Is externalized on the most vulnerable people we allow for exploitation. 

[00:31:59] Cayden Mak: By 

[00:31:59] Carmen Rojas: making that, by normalizing that.

And when people are like, I’m gonna stop doing this for one day. I’m like, fuck, stop doing it. Just stop doing it. If you can do it for one, stop doing it. Stop doing it for one week, stop doing it for one month. I have, I’m the youngest kid in my family and my eldest brother is really into social media and I’m not, and I have not been for a very long time.

And after this fall we just had this really very direct conversation and I just love him so much. He was like, oh yeah, I’m just gonna take these off my phone. I don’t really need them. And I was like, oh, wow. Like he, his. He was at like a big life on social media and he got off and it has been just so amazing.

One, we just talk on the telephone more. So there’s like that we just are more connected actually with each other than getting ’cause I don’t have social media. You like, take, does an Instagram post and then sends it to me. I’m like, oh yeah, no, just call me and tell me what you’re doing.

I have fun. And I think we can all do that, right? Like we all have choices, not only to divest in this way that we did with our endowment, but to invest, right? Like we made a choice that we wanted to make sure that our endowment was managed by people who look like the United States of America. So 50% of our endowment is managed by people of color.

It’s three fourths of our endowment is managed by people of color and women. That’s who we are. That is the nation that we are. And I think sometimes we imagine that is impossible or subpar charity and some people we are evidence that it’s not. 

[00:33:41] Cayden Mak: Yeah. No, it’s, I, it’s, I think it’s an destructive story and like it’s, clearly, like I, I don’t know. Like I, I feel like there’s often a lot of like hand wring about this and I do my own handwriting too. Obviously I run a media business and one of the challenges that we have is like, how do you find audiences? You find them on social media. Totally. But also like, how do, at the same time we build like streams of contact with the people who care about what we’re putting out that may circumvent that or allow us to reach them in spite of it.

And it’s hard. It’s not, sometimes it’s not easy because it’s like this balance of what is the cost and what is the benefit that are like, not always super clear, but yeah, there’s a lot that needs to be figured out in the doing. 

[00:34:23] Carmen Rojas: Totally. I also wonder, Caden, for you all and for others, like how do we use this as a jumping off point to the next thing?

[00:34:29] Cayden Mak: Yes. Yes. And like I think 

[00:34:30] Carmen Rojas: sometimes we imagine that the thing that is the only thing available to us. And the gift I think for me, of running Marguerite Casey Foundation and supporting our grant recipients is starting to be like Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web. And build a web to a another place that is more accountable.

And then we build a web to another place that is more accountable and transparent. And then we build a web to another place, but not just resting into what exists because it is there. 

[00:35:04] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we need not take it for granted. I wonder also, I guess related to this conversation is thinking a bit about the future.

Last fall I talked with a couple of folks who I’m sure who work in philanthropy and donor organizing including Vinny Sali from Solidaire Mike Gast, who writes, organize the Rich about what’s at stake in our democracy and what is the role that people with resources need to be playing in this fight?

The stakes have changed. Things have shifted a bit since I had those conversations with folks like Vinny and Mike. But I’m curious, like at this juncture and thinking about how we. Plant seeds that like push us towards that future. What do you think the role of not just institutional philanthropy, but also perhaps folks with wealth, people who are thinking about how do I move resources into movements?

What is the role that you all want to be playing this year and in the coming years? And what are some lessons that you’ve learned about how grant makers and others who have these resources can be? Can do to be in service of a democracy that works for the many. 

[00:36:14] Carmen Rojas: I think in the the first thing is the functional job, which is give out as much money as you possibly can to organizing and to organizing with a focus on taking state power, right?

Be explicit, be clear. Be resourceful and abundant in the ways that you resource that funders, resource organizations and leaders that are both at the front line of holding the fight and imagining what the future that we want is right. Like we have to fund both of those things at the same time.

So give out as much money as possible. I think too is like accompanying organizations, like as organizations get attacked. Don’t just send somebody a personal email. We have access to organization, to media organizations, to publications. People are more likely to take an op-ed from me than from somebody who leads the nonprofit on the border or anywhere frankly.

Yeah, rent those things, enter the communication fray and get the fight. I think third and the thing that I’m sitting with is that it’s not enough to protect philanthropy in the nonprofit sector. I think we’re in this very funny moment where, because for the first time probably ever philanthropy is in a full it’s in the crosshairs 

Of an administration of a political party. There’s a desire. To protect our institutions, but it, we, our institutions may exist, but without the right to protest, but without the right to unionize, but without a minimum wage, but without worker protections. But without, and it doesn’t matter to me.

If we exist as institutions in a context in which we’ve hollowed out the set of. The semblance because they are not perfect. They’re brittle. Protections that we have come to enjoy in some places, pleading and in some places, never in this country, but even in our imagination. The right to protest, the right to read books the right to be trans, the right to do whatever you want with your body, these are it’s, it wasn’t like back in the day we were able to do these things. It was in the last decade we were able, it was unquestionable that I should have control over my body.

It was unquestionable that if I got together with a group. Of my sort of community members and wanted to protest somebody that we could do that without going to jail, without being shot down, without being docked, without fear of retribution. And I think in this moment we have to tie our fate to civil society and the set of freedoms and protections that are going to get us through this political time.

[00:39:08] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. No, I feel like it is. It makes sense that folks are scared. Like I think the, especially talking about this from the perspective of some of these institutions, some of the philanthropic institutions have existed for over a hundred years. Yeah. And so I think it makes sense and it makes sense for anybody to be worried about things like job security, whatever.

But no it’s very refreshing 

[00:39:33] Carmen Rojas: to be, oh, I was also scared. I should actually also be honest yeah. We at Margaret Casey, we have been preparing for this contextual turn for about 18 months. We have done everything we could do internal, done everything we can do externally, work with our staff, work with lawyers.

And so in my mind, I was prepared for this turn. The moment November happened it was like a fissure in my heart. A fisher set it in my heart. And one of my kid coping mechanisms was that I was the great invisible kid. Really? But my mom is one of 17, my dad is one of 10. My we have big families and I’m like a fake extrovert.

And so my magic was that like I could always just disappear into a corner, read a book. It was like my, it was my magic and un. Unintentionally, I could feel the fear consume me and I can feel myself wanting to become more still and more invisible. 

[00:40:36] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:40:37] Carmen Rojas: And November happened, December happened, January happened, and we had a leadership team meeting in Zebra.

And our leadership team was like, even if we are the most invisible, it doesn’t make us safe. And it was like a break happened for me where I was like, oh my God. Like this kid thing that I had inside of me to make me feel safe. I was drawing on now as an adult and I. It allowed me to have the turn.

Like we have an internal organizational culture where that is a conversation and that is a statement that could be made at an non-threatening and an absolutely loving way. And as a reminder of what my job is in this moment, right? And I think many people we are going like falling back into.

Like our flight, what is it? Fight, freeze, appease. Like different people are falling into that. And I wanna give them as much grace as possible. And I just wanna be honest that it happened to me too, 

[00:41:35] Cayden Mak: yeah. And it 

[00:41:36] Carmen Rojas: took having a strong internal team to be like, Hey, friend, like I get what’s happening and we are scared too, but we’re here together.

And it allowed me. To actually hug up on my kid, hug up on my kidney and release it as an activity and to be like, oh yeah, no we’re gonna fight. And to be clear in what it looks like to be in a fight for our collective future. 

[00:42:05] Cayden Mak: Yeah. That is very instructive. It’s also one, I appreciate your vulnerability about it.

’cause I think that it is not that, it is, not that I’m not scared either, right? Like I’m putting this podcast out on the internet every week. Anybody can listen to it. But that being dancing with the fear is actually what we’re called to do right now. 

[00:42:24] Carmen Rojas: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

[00:42:28] Cayden Mak: Before we take off, is there anything else you wanna share with our listeners places that people can keep up with, especially the public facing political education that you all are doing in an ongoing basis? 

[00:42:37] Carmen Rojas: Yeah. Sign up on our website. We could go to our website. You could sign up for our book clubs.

We have summer school this year. I think the other thing is, again, fund organizing. I think right after November there was this whole sense of the groups are. Terrible. The groups aren’t doing whatever, there was this, the albatross of the gr of the quote unquote groups. Groups are actually people who come together to fight for a better future.

And we cannot abandon them in this moment, especially if they are organizing, fighting, and winning things that materially change people’s lives. 

[00:43:12] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And the groups are a big reason why this wasn’t more of a train wreck. 

[00:43:15] Carmen Rojas: Totally. They’re holding the line and we have. Yeah. 

[00:43:20] Cayden Mak: Amazing.

Thank you so much for joining us this week, Carmen. It was a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:43:25] Carmen Rojas: Thanks Kayden. It so great to meet you. 

[00:43:28] Cayden Mak: Alright, take care. 

[00:43:30] Carmen Rojas: Bye you. 

[00:43:32] Cayden Mak: My thanks again to Carmen Rojas for joining me this week. You can learn more about Marguerite Casey Foundation’s public facing political education events at the links in the show notes.

This show is produced by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden Mock, and our producer is Josh Stro Kimie. David is our production assistant. If you have something to say, please do drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming episode at mailbag, at convergence mag.com.

And finally, if you would like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements.

I hope this helps.